Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency

Colley Carola

Carola Colley

Recent work has revolved around collaborative interlinked projects with poets, artists and musicians as part of my ongoing investigation ‘9 Threads Woven’. Drawing and mark making is at the heart of my practice, whether through direct observation or exploring the abstraction of pattern. My interest is increasingly drawn to the Paleolithic era and to Myth, especially the cross-cultural aspects of mythical characters. This excerpt from Phoebe Colley’s essay from
2015 helps sum it up:

‘9 Threads Woven is thus not a reference to a finite collection. Instead it hints at a back catalogue of influences that have intersected within her practise and that continue to expand, ranging from knots and mussel shells, to the poetry of Usha Kishore and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the histories of landscapes.

Tim Ingold, when discussing ‘the meshwork’ of existence in his collection Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, argues…we must cease regarding the world as an inert substratum, over which living things propel themselves about like counters on a board… Whatever surfaces one encounters, whether of the ground, water, vegetation or buildings, are in the world, not of it. And woven into their very texture are the lines of growth and movement of its inhabitants. every such line, in short, is a way through rather than across.’ (full essay is on my website)